Courts of law — committees — calls
Of a morning — clubs — book-stalls —
Churches — masquerades — and tombs.
And this is Hell — and in this smother
All are damnable and damned;
Each one damning, damns the other;
They are damned by one another,
By none other are they damned.65
Shelley’s hatred for the hypocrisies, cruelties, injustices and genteel class-layerings of metropolitan life, which first made itself shown in his early broadsheet ‘The Devil’s Walk’, had found its purest political expression in The Mask. Here it found a satiric one, something closer to Pope, and Byron and Peacock. But Shelley had not done with the theme in Peter Bell the Third. A celebrated sonnet written right at the end of 1819 as a kind of retrospective, returns to this passage, condensing it and embittering it; and the transformation of the impulse continued in later poems. The very last long poem of Shelley’s life, ‘The Triumph of Life’, still shows a continuity of theme with this section of Peter Bell, developing especially the idea of a grotesque ceaseless procession of vain human activity. The ultimate classical model for such writing is Juvenal.
Section 5 of the poem, ‘Grace’, is by contrast a thoroughly individualized portrait of Wordsworth himself, as he appeared as a great poet before his Zoroastrian ‘damnation’ overtook him. Shelley gradually fades out the sharpness and acidity of the writing, the lines flow more smoothly and the rhymes take on lyric rather than epigrammatic force. Finally we are given a poetic assessment and celebration of Wordsworth’s gift which is as fine as anything rendered by Coleridge or Hazlitt, or later in the essays of J.S. Mill or Arnold.
For in his thought he visited
The spots in which, ere dead and damned,
He his wayward life had led;
Yet knew not whence the thoughts were fed
Which thus his fancy crammed.
And these obscure remembrances
Stirred such harmony in Peter,
That, whensoever he should please,
He could speak of rocks and trees
In poetic metre.
For though it was without a sense
Of memory, yet he remembered well
Many a ditch and quick-set fence;
Of lakes he had intelligence,
He knew something of heath and fell.
He had also dim recollections
Of pedlars tramping on their rounds;
Milk-pans and pails; and odd collections
Of saws, and proverbs; and reflections
Old parsons make in burying-grounds.
But Peter’s verse was clear, and came
Announcing from the frozen hearth
Of a cold age, that none might tame
The soul of that diviner flame
It augured to the Earth:
Like gentle rains, on the dry plains,
Making that green which late was gray,
Or like the sudden moon, that stains
Some gloomy chamber’s window-panes
With a broad light this day.
For language was in Peter’s hand
Like clay while he was yet a potter;
And he made songs for all the land,
Sweet both to feel and understand,
As pipkins late to mountain Cotter.66
In the variety of Shelley’s explosive creativity during these weeks it is sometimes difficult to reconcile the idea of him writing ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and Peter Bell the Third, within not merely days, but possibly within hours of each other. Yet here, in the wonderful bright expansion of feeling, and the flowing verse lines of stanzas 5 and 6, the harmonious and almost unbroken continuity of the inspiration between the two poems is unmistakable.
Shelley gave the poem to Mary on 1 November to fair-copy in preparation for immediate publication in London. She finished it the following day, despite the momentary expectation of labour pains. Later she wrote that although it must be looked upon as a plaything, it had ‘much merit and poetry — so much of himself in it’.67 The manuscript was posted directly to Hunt, ‘you being kind enough to take upon yourself the correction of the press’. But Peter Bell the Third was not published until Mary’s collected edition of 1839. Though Shelley asked after it throughout the winter, no real explanation was ever forthcoming from either Ollier or Hunt.
For the first time really since June, in this covering letter of Shelley’s the positive presence of Mary was felt again, as if she had now returned to his life. ‘Next post day you may hear from me again, as I have many things to say, & expect to have to announce Mary’s new work, now in the press. — She has written out as you will observe, my Peter & this is, I suspect the last thing she will do before the new birth.’68 The connection between Mary’s baby and his own sources of creativity and hope, runs deeply through all the poetry of this autumn, gradually emerging in the imagery, and finally becoming explicit in these letters of November.
Yet the baby was not yet born, and Shelley’s fantastic writing output continued through the first week of November. From the 1st, Shelley began drafting a long open letter of protest for the Examiner on the subject of Richard Carlile’s trial in London which had begun on 10 October and had become a cause célèbre of both the liberal and radical press. Shelley was especially interested in Carlile since of the ten indictments to be faced for blasphemous and seditious libel, one concerned the publication of a popular edition of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, and another Carlile’s brilliant reporting of the Peterloo affair in Sherwin’s Political Register.
Shelley took five days to write the densely argued composition, which ran in the end to over 6,000 words in length, and became virtually a pamphlet on the legal basis of the freedom of the press. He appears to have begun it on the same day that he completed Peter Bell the Third.69 The astonishing speed and range of his creative output, which had now run in an unbroken curve from 6 September when he first received news of Peterloo, until 5 November, embracing such widely different genres of poetry and prose, and simultaneously throwing off a comet’s tail of ballad fragments and songs, suggest a state of exultant energy and vision, a consciousness of formidable active powers that it is difficult to conceive in ordinary terms.
The outcome of Carlile’s trial was especially significant for Shelley for it marked the first decisive check of political hopes. Carlile was convicted on two counts of ‘wicked malicious and blasphemous libel’: his sentence totalled three years, and his fine £1,500. This in itself was sufficiently crippling in personal terms: but on top of it, the local authorities managed to seize his entire stock of 70,000 books, thus ruining at a stroke his whole capital investment. At the time, it looked to Shelley and many other observers that in the silencing of Carlile the government had won a tactical victory.[9] Shelley did not for a moment believe this would divert the inevitable course of radical reform; but he believed that it made the chances of a bloody and insurrectionary confrontation more likely between the popular party and the government. Such a confrontation he felt — as he had always felt — made the danger of a military despotism very great, in which the mass of the people would be no better off and no more democratically represented than before.
His Carlile letter makes three major points. First, that Carlile, as a Deist, was being tried essentially for his religious opinions; but since he was being judged by a jury of staunch Christians they could not by legal definition be regarded as ‘his peers’. Therefore the jury was not valid. Secondly, that it was nonsense to prosecute Carlile for publishing Tom Paine, if the government did not equally prosecute middle-class booksellers, who published deistical writings by Hume, Gibbon, Sir William Drummond, Godwin or Jeremy Bentham. Thirdly, that though it might be assumed, correctly or incorrectly, that Carlile published with the intention of making money, ‘with the innocent design of maintaining his wife and children’, there was not a shred of legal evidence to prove that Carlile published with an intention that
was either ‘wicked’ or ‘malicious’. All three of these points are solid legal arguments against the conviction; indeed the last has a distinct ring of the Inner Temple about it.
Shelley’s summary — though in the hurry of composition he did not manage to assign it to the end — is masterly. It seems to have been written to be declaimed. Its great and characteristic strength is its unhesitating penetration through the particular legal case to the general political one.
In prosecuting Carlile they have used the superstition of the Jury as their instrument for crushing a political enemy, or rather they strike in his person at all their political enemies. They know that the Established Church is based upon the belief in certain events of a supernatural character having occurred in Judea eighteen centuries ago; that but for his belief the farmer would refuse to pay the tenth of the produce of his labours to maintain its numbers in idleness; that this class of persons if not maintained in idleness would have something else to do than to divert the attention of the people from obtaining a Reform in the oppressive government, & that consequently the government would be reformed, & that the people would receive a just price for their labours. . . .70
The Carlile letter, like everything that Shelley had composed especially for publication during this autumn, was never published in his lifetime. Indeed it was only first printed, complete in 1926.71
For the first time Shelley seemed to realize in considering Carlile’s fate what would happen to his own political writing in the hands of Hunt and Ollier. In proposing a public subscription for Carlile’s benefit, he remarked wistfully to Hunt, ‘I know the value of your occupation & the delicacy of your health, & I am sorry [that] this winter time I cannot be with you to [assist] in the performance of this duty.’ This was, as he gradually realized, the crucial point.72
At the end of the Carlile letter, Shelley took the opportunity of looking across the broad panorama of political development during the autumn of 1819, and he openly referred to the difference in degree between his own radicalism and Hunt’s liberalism, while still acknowledging the fundamental unity of their objectives. It was one of his great avowals of permanent political commitment. ‘These my dear Hunt are awful times. The tremendous question is now agitating, whether a military & judicial despotism is to be established by our present rulers, or some form of government less unfavourable to the real & permanent interests of all men is to arise from the conflict of passions now gathering to overturn them: We cannot hesitate which party to embrace; and whatever revolutions are to occur, though oppression should change names & names cease to be oppressions, our party will be that of liberty & of the oppressed. Whatever you may imagine to be our differences in political theory, I trust that I shall be able to prove that they are less than you imagine, by agreeing, as from my soul I do, with your principles of political practice.’ Shelley began to analyse further their differences of ‘theory & practice’, but on second thoughts he crossed the sentence out. It was not the moment for disquisitions; it was time for men to stand together. Shelley stood by Hunt in spirit amid the ‘despicable tyrants & imposters’; but would Hunt stand by Shelley in practice? Would he publish?
Shelley put down his pen. For the time being, there was no more to write. He read aloud to Mary as she rested on the sofa, waiting for the labour pains to begin.73 He took Hunt’s portrait from his desk, and hung it on the wall opposite Mary’s bed.74 On 6 November a brief letter went off to the Gisbornes, again advising them against leaving their investments in government bonds. ‘I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great sandy desert of Politics; not, you may imagine, without the hope of finding some enchanted paradise.’ Then, extravagantly developing the metaphor, as he had learnt to do from Calderón — ‘Calderonizing’ as he called it to Maria Gisborne — he continued cheerfully: ‘In all probability, I shall be overwhelmed by one of the tempestuous columns which are forever traversing with the speed of a storm & the confusion of a chaos that pathless wilderness. You meanwhile will be lamenting in some happy Oasis that I do not return.’ The weather had now broken completely. There was frequent rain and lightning in the afternoons and evenings. But Shelley still liked to slip out when he could to the gardens of the Cascini, ‘where I often walk alone watching the leaves & the rising & falling of the Arno’. He was, he said, full of all kinds of literary plans.75
[1]The hour-by-hour account may be reconstructed from reports by Tyas in The Times; Baines in the Leeds Mercury, and Richard Carlile in the Political Register. There is also the evidence given in court in The Trial of Henry Hunt; and three excellent eye-witness accounts, one from a lieutenant in the 15th Hussars, eventually published in Three Accounts of Peterloo, edited by F. A. Bruton (1921). Samuel Bamford was one of the organizers of the meeting.
[2] When Henry Hunt entered London for his trial on 15 September 1819, an observer noted: ‘The whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor [Strand] was lined with multitudes.’ The anxious onlooker was John Keats.
[3] It was exactly this kind of liberalism that Hazlitt ridiculed in a retrospective essay of autumn 1825: ‘But the great thing was to be genteel, and keep out of the rabble. They that touch pitch are defiled. “No connection with the mob”, was labelled on the back of every friend of the People. Every faithful retainer of the Opposition took care to disclaim all affinity with such fellows as [Henry] Hunt, Carlile, or Cobbett… the chief dread of the Minority was to be confounded with the populace, the Canaille etc.’
[4]The only piece of Shelley’s writing published at this critical time in England in fact appeared in the fifth issue of the Republican, on 24 December 1819. Ironically, it was his old Declaration of Rights dating from 1812, and Carlile did not know the name of the author.
[5]John Taylor Coleridge, after this suitable debut, became a King’s Bench judge and the biographer of Keble.
[6] The Fudge family were characters in a popular children’s series of stories that Tom Moore had written.
[7] The unreformed House of Commons.
[8] The ‘gentler sisters’ are of course the London prostitutes, and Shelley wrote in his own footnote: ‘What would the husk and excuse for virtue be without its kernel prostitution?’ Chastity in order to rhyme with miserè has to be pronounced genteelly.
[9] In the event Richard Carlile was to prove indomitable, and he published and was damned for many more years; during this imprisonment, at Dorchester jail, he wrote one of the earliest popular features on family planning and birth control, called What is Love, based on an illegal pamphlet by the young John Stuart Mill.
23. From the Gallery: Florence 1820
Mary’s fourth child was born on the morning of 12 November 1819. After all their arrangements, Dr Bell did not manage to be present, but the labour was an easy one, over in two hours. To Shelley’s great delight the child was a boy: small, but healthy and pretty. Much of Shelley’s relief and pleasure came from the evident effect on Mary. ‘Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled. For we have spent as you may imagine a miserable five months.’1 They christened him after his father and his birthplace, Percy Florence Shelley.
Both Shelley and Mary found the child very absorbing, and the days being shorter, and darker, they slipped by unnoticed. Shelley went out less by himself, and Mary again omitted to keep her journal. After a week or so, he began slowly to send off letters, but he did not hurry to complete them. To Maria Gisborne, he calderonized on Calderón. ‘I have been lately voyaging in a sea without my pilot, & although my sail has often been torn, my boat become leaky, & the log lost, I have yet sailed in a kind of way from island to island. . . . I have been reading Calderon without you.’ By way of a P.S. he copied out four stanzas from the Cisma de Inglaterra, a play about incestuous love, without bothering to translate them from the Spanish.2 To John Gisborne he wrote sagely of Theocritus and the British Funds and the follies of youth. ‘All of us who are worth any thing spend our manhood in unlearning the fo
llies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.’3 To Aemilia Curran in Rome, he spoke of the new baby, and Godwin’s debts, and his vague plan to go secretly to England in the spring.4
After receiving news from Henry Reveley of another birth, that of an eighty-three-pound bronze air cylinder for the steam-boat in the workshop at Livorno, he calderonized on the Creation. Anxious to please Shelley, Reveley had described in great detail the casting of the mould and the ‘massy stream of a bluish dazzling whiteness’ of molten metal rushing in like ‘the twinkling of a shooting star’. Shelley replied in kind: ‘Your volcanic description of the birth of the Cylinder is very characteristic both of you & of it. One might imagine God when he made the earth, & saw the granite mountains & flinty promontories flow into their craggy forms, & the splendour of their fusion filling millions of miles of void space, like the tail of a comet, so looking & so delighting in his work. God sees his machine spinning round the sun & delights in its success, & has taken out patents to supply all the suns in space with the same manufacture. — Your boat will be to the Ocean of Water what the earth is to the Ocean of Aether — a prosperous & swift voyager.’ The metal steamer had been transformed into one of Shelley’s luminous airships. Charles Clairmont, who had left the Palazzo Marini on 10 November ‘not without many lamentations as all true lovers pay’, had been commissioned to write an account of the Trieste Steam Boat especially for Reveley.5
A letter to Hunt of the 18th discussed baby clothes and the difficulties of translation. In between were slipped tentative literary inquiries: ‘You do not tell me whether you have received my lines on the Manchester affair. . . . The “Julian and Maddalo” I do not know how it ought to be published. What do you think best to do with it? Do as you like.’ There were a few sentences on politics, the need to hold the balance between ‘popular impatience and tyrannical obstinacy’. The great thing to do, Shelley wrote, pressing the cause of moderation in a way designed to appeal to the editor of the Examiner, ‘is to inculcate with fervour both the right of resistance and the duty of forbearance’. But even on this occasion he could not quite restrain his radicalism. ‘You know my principles incite me to take all the good I can get in politics, for ever aspiring to something more. I am one of those whom nothing will fully satisfy, but who am ready to be partially satisfied by all that is practicable. We shall see.’6